How do we insulate without a roof space?

[janinlondon]

Someone else must have tackled this problem? Third floor attic room leaking heat into the atmosphere at a frightening rate. Impossible to keep warm. But there is no roof space - lathe plaster onto roof beams only. Does anyone have a solution please?

You have to insulate the ceiling don't you? The spaces between the roof beams. Then replace the ceiling / put in a new one over the top. You can get insulation to do that, I'm sure.

You mean pull the ceiling and the joists down? The ceiling is plaster onto and between the joists for the roof, so a solid mass, filling between the joists.....? I am sure there is a way - most houses built in London in the late 1800s had this kind of ceiling.....

You add a new ceiling and put the insulation in between the original roof and the new ceiling. My dp does it.

Or if you can't fit insulation eg because there is a room under the roof - you can consider building a "warm roof" with insulation above the roof timbers and under the slates, though this is more expensive unless you need to replace the roof covering anyway.

Hmm. Yes, there is a room and adding a new ceiling and reducing head height would be a problem. There is a felt covering under the roof tiles. Is that what we would have to replace? ie: take the slates off?

Well those are the two main options. It's DP who's the expert not me so I don't know about relative costs, you'd need to get quotes - or are you doing it yourselves?

We have lots of roof rooms here too, one is already too low so DP is considering raising the roof on it and adding insulation. But he does these things for fun.

Good grief Fennel - for FUN???? DH told me not to even consider insulation as it would cost us a fortune. Looks like he was right. (sigh)

We have a 3rd floor garret room with a pitched ceiling . The 3rd floor is our bedroom. It has insulation between the plaster and the outside roof.
I am crap at any knowledge of how this was done. i'll see if i can find the survey.

Janinlondon we have done this. It was expensive but well worth it. We got a firm in who attached special insulation (quite thin, shiny on one side) to the existing ceiling, then put battens and new plasterboard on top and plastered over that. Overall thickness including everything was just over 6 cm so we did not lose a huge amount of space.

They had to punch holes in the existing ceiling first for ventilation.

Total cost was £6k including labour, but we had two large attic rooms done, one with a vaulted ceiling.

It has made a big difference to those two rooms (one is my office and used to be icy in winter, now I rarely need the heating on in there)and also to the overall warmth of the house.

Can't remember the brand name of the insulation but probably have it on file if you need more info.

We used a local roofing firm to do the work, rather than an insulation specialist.

Just to add, it was much cheaper to do it this way than taking off roof tiles and insulating beneath them, which would have been the alternative.

Thanks Sophy. Six centimetres would make the room unusable I think, but in any case it would take us a long time to recoup £6k in heating bills......!

Ask on this website - they are quite nice here

We have a similar room to you, but having suffered with suffocating summer heat, then ice-box winters, we really wanted to get it sorted!

We had to reslate anyway, but I don't think that should make a difference to insulation which is done from inside. What I think you'd need to do is to strip away all the plaster etc, so you get back to the roofing battens, roof joists etc. Then, in the space between the joists (ie in the thickness) put in whatever insulation will fit - we used Kingspan, as it gives you most insulation with least thickness). Then you can batten and plasterboard. That should give you MUCH better insulation than you currently have.

We did something on top of this, to make sure it was well insulated, using the 'space blanket' insulation as well (which also allowed us to insulate the big beams, which can otherwise be a cold bridge). But that did lose us about 2 inches in room height, I think. The other should all be doable within the joist thickness, so you shouldn't lose any height.